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I’ve just finished a new release of the v002 Blurs which fix some bugs, bring even more performance and importantly fix compatibility issues behind the scenes for Quartz Composer 4.0 which just shipped with Mac OS X 10.6.

The Glitch plugins have been consolidated to a single plugin with multiple patches, and I have added a few new patches, Glitch File Reader – interpret any file as a movie and ‘play’ through it, Core Video GL Glitch – play through pools of pbuffers on your video card to visualize random GPU memory, FBO Glitch – play through pools of frame buffer objects on your video card, and specify the texture format for interpreting background GPU memory. These are all fun source plugins that generate bit-glitch and interesting patterns. Here is a fun example of it being used as a screen saver for your Mac:

v002 Optical Flow is also released, which is a port of Andrew Bensons GLSL based optical flow implementation for Jitter, which includes his distort based on optical flow values. I’ve also added a patch to the plugin set that allows for some bluring/smearing based on flow. Here is a nice example of using the Optical Flow on Particle Systems:

Ive uploaded v002 Blurs 1.2, now packaged as a single easy to install plugin (no need to install 3 different plugins now).

Changes include much improved OpenGL resource usage ‘behind the scenes’ which speeds things up even more, fixes for proper handling of alpha channels within the blurs, and greatly improved algorithms for the Zoom and Motion blur. These two are much more usable now, and produce much nicer results than previous versions.

If you currently use the older blurs (1.1 or 1.0), you can remove all 3 v002 blur plugins and install the new ‘Blurs’ plugin. This will make sure you have the latest and greatest and do not accidentally use the older plugins.

Im very happy to be able to release our Rutt/Etra emulation plugin, as it has been a long time in the works. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work with Bill Etra to make this plugin as authentic to the as possible. Steve Rutt and Bill Etra originally began work on the Rutt Etra in 1972, and its look is still as modern and interesting as ever. Bill now lives in New York City, on disability.

v002 Movie Player beta 2 has a few useful updates. Relative paths now work, as well as compatibility with the Directory Scanner patch. Fixed a bug/incompatibility with QTVisualContextTask() and the QC context image provider convenience methods – we now supply our own QCPluginOutputImageProvider class and handle drawing ourselves. This means eventually we can handle various aperture modes supported from within Quicktime/Core Video as well. Also added signal start/stop/reset, and normalized, non-normalized time outputs, as well as duration outputs. All in all a nice update.

First up is a new Movie Player plugin for Quartz Composer. This plugin attempts to give more control over the higher performance Asynchronous Mode of the built in movie player, but with more useful inputs and outputs available.

Next up are 3 new glitch plugins, that have to be played with to be appreciated. See the sidebar for links…

Ive posted a set of blurs to replace the standard built in Apple blurs for Quartz Composer. Ive created new Gaussian, Motion and Zoom blurs which are better suited for realtime video use. These blurs are very fast on modern hardware, and quite competitive on older systems as well.

The blurs take some shortcuts which the built in blurs do not, which is how the speed up works. This shortcut lowers the amount of processing the GPU has to do, so allows you to have more blurs, and larger blurs than usual. Hopefully this will be of use to folks. Thanks to all the beta testers for helping round out the plugins. You can find them on their respective plugin pages. If you have any bug reports, suggestions or comments on the individual blurs, please post to their respective pages: